Discussion Posts
Provide a one-page document outlining your prior financial and/or investment experience and your current interests in this subject if you have any. I realize that many of you are only taking this class because it is required, which is okay, but I would like to learn what you hope to get from this course.
First off I want to apologize to everyone for my late post this week, this will not be a persistent behavior, this week has just been a crazy travel week for me.
Hello! My name is Rich Bocchinfuso; I hold a BS in Computer Science, an MS in Computer Information Systems, and I am pursuing an MS in Information Technology with a specialization in Cybersecurity at Florida Tech. I am 44 years old and have been in technology for the past 20+ years, and I am lucky in the sense that my career as a technologist and programmer is also my passion because I spend 10 to 15 hours a day in front of a computer. I live in New Jersey, and I am based out of my companies New York City regional office, but I am often on the road or working from home. I am married to my wife of seventeen years, Gwen, and we have two little girls Maddy who is twelve and Eden who is seven. Both my wife and I are originally from Pennsylvania, but we have made in New Jersey our home for the past twenty years.
My desire to attend graduate school is driven by personal fulfillment as well as a desire to develop skills which will allow me to grow professionally. My goal is to complete the master’s program in information technology with a specialization in cybersecurity and to put the academic skills I acquire to practical use. I am a driven self-starter who is committed to achieving my educational and professional goals. With the half-life of discrete technical knowledge shrinking I have been leveraging learning platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, CloudAcademy, CBT Nuggets, Codeacademy, SoloLearn and others for years to combat mental atrophy. I regularly listen to and watch podcasts, and read industry publications and whitepapers to stay abreast of industry happenings.
I am an avid listener of The Dave Ramsey Show and Mad Money with Jim Kramer.
For as long as I can remember I have loved tinkering and it is this love of tinkering that became the basis of my love of computing and technology. Over the past twenty-plus years, I have invested an immense amount of time honing my craft. I am an avid maker; I enjoy building things, writing about and sharing what I create. For the past ten years, I have been maintaining and sharing my ideas via my personal blog (http://gotitsolutions.org).
I am an analytical person who enjoys making decisions rooted in empirical data, and I am an INTP (https://www.16personalities.com/profiles/57648d209ea7b).
With regards to my financial experience, I run an engineering division within my company and manage things like labor costs, pipeline, backlog, revenue recognition, resource utilization, gross profit, margins and other critical operational metrics on a daily basis. I have to admit some of the accounting principles like revenue recognition drive me a bit crazy, but MGT5002: Corporate Finance helped me to reconcile many of things that I have been doing for years but didn’t deeply understand why.
Personally, I like to follow the stock market and market trends, especially in the technology sector but I try to maintain a balanced portfolio. Twenty-plus years ago a friend of mine introduced me to Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRIP) through a book called The Money Paper and the concept of dollar-cost averaging. I started buying stocks directly from companies and have continued this practice of acquiring equities over the past twenty years although today the process is much more straightforward with the emergence of Sharebuilder.
In the late 90s, like many of us in technology at the time, I learned a lot about venture capital (VC), restricted stock, stock preferences, capitalization, and recapitalization. Many of the business decisions that were made in the late 90s and were often driven by VCs and seemed to lack common sense; there was crazy money flowing into tech, venture capitalists were trying to build fast follower businesses and drive to an IPO without sound fundamentals. I learned a lot of what not to do, how not to run a business, etc… during that period of my career.
I am a big Jim Cramer and Dave Ramsey fan, I have read The Total Money Makeover. I would classify personal financial philosophy as fiscally paranoid; my father taught me that you should always be your most significant creditor, meaning that you should pay yourself (save) first and more than you pay any other creditor. This is how I learned to live my life; when things get unbalanced, and the percentages don’t align with my plan I struggle to sleep at night (aka fiscal paranoia).
A couple of my favorite Dave Ramsey quotes are:
- “If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.” – Dave Ramsey
- “Act your wage.” – Dave Ramsey
We use many of Dave Ramsey’s techniques in my house, for instance, we have a save, give, and send banks (coffee cans) for each of my children. We ask them to allocate 1/3 or their money for savings, 1/3 of their money for tidings, and 1/3 of their money for spending (acquisition of things).
I hope that I can learn something new and apply academic principles to my applied knowledge which always helps me to develop a deeper understanding of a topic. This was certainly the case with the coursework from MGT5002: Corporate Finance and I suspect it will be the case here as well. With MGT5002, the accounting aspects were not that interesting to me although the material did help me better understand concepts I am exposed to daily, I do have an interest in the capital markets, investing, etc… so I expect to get even more out of this class.
I am happy to be part of this class, and I look for to sharing this learning experience with all of you.
Post an investing website you like to use.
My apologies for the late response, this will definitely not a persistent behavior, this has been a crazy week of travel.
Here are some of the online investment tools I use on a regular basis:
CapitalOne Investing PortfolioBuilder (formerly Sharebuilder): https://www.capitaloneinvesting.com/main/investing/tools.aspx
Robinhood (free stock trading): https://www.robinhood.com/
Google Finance: https://finance.google.com/finance
Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/
Investopedia: http://www.investopedia.com/
Morningstar: http://www.morningstar.com/
Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/
The Motley Fool: https://www.fool.com/
I also use JStock (https://jstock.org/) on both my desktop and Android mobile device.
Assignment
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